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The American Dream
Whereas white conservative Louisianans like Mike Schaff generally “defined as racist a person who used the ‘N’ word or who ‘hates’ blacks,” Hochschild sticks to a sociological concept of racism as “the belief in a natural hierarchy that places blacks at the bottom, and the tendency of whites to judge their own worth by distance from that bottom.” This difference is crucial to understanding conservative Louisianans’belief that they are not racist, even though many mix their distaste for government welfare with horribly exaggerated and generalized media stereotypes about black Americans. In general, Hochschild says, the white people she met had little to do with or say about black Louisianans, but “spoke freely” about their feelings on Muslims and Mexicans. Many of the people Hochschild met in Louisiana thought of systemic racism as a thing of the past and saw no issue with casting their ballots for Donald Trump.
Racism Quotes in Strangers in Their Own Land
The Strangers in Their Own Land quotes below are all either spoken by Racism or refer to Racism. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 9
Quotes
Missing from the image of blacks in most of the minds of those I came to know was a man or woman standing patiently in line next to them waiting for a well-deserved reward.
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Chapter 14
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How do you join the identity politics parade and also bring it to a halt?
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Afterword
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Disaggregated, such smaller narratives hung free, maybe to gather in some new way downstream. And to all this was the background presence of a powerful truth—life had been hard for them and it could get a lot worse.
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The history of the United States has been the history of whites cutting ahead of blacks, first of all through slavery, and later through Jim Crow laws and then through New Deal legislation and the post-World War II GI Bill, which offered help to millions of Americans with the exception of those in farm and domestic work, occupations in which blacks were overrepresented. And racial discrimination continues today.
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Racism Term Timeline in Strangers in Their Own Land
The timeline below shows where the term Racism appears in Strangers in Their Own Land. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 9 – The Deep Story
...being racists even though, “by their own definition, they clearly were not.” They think of racism as explicit hatred for blacks—Mike Schaff even admits to being a “former bigot” who “used...
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Hochschild offers a different, sociological definition of racism as “the belief in a natural hierarchy that places blacks at the bottom, and the...
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Afterword to the Paperback Edition
Hochschild explains that the events in Charlottesville were “rekindling a nationwide racism that had never disappeared.” Racist movements have waxed and waned with the times, in the...
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Hochschild concludes that Louisianans’ hostility to “unitary,” explicit racism is undermined by the racist “subnarratives” they still believe. They will condemn the KKK but...
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These Louisianans believe that liberal Americans’ “race consciousness was itself a form of racism” and feel that liberals define them by their whiteness. Ray Bowman worries that his son...
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